{"id":"C1968A00035","name":"Queensland Grant (Maraboon Dam) Act 1968","slug":"queensland-grant-maraboon-dam-act-1968","collection":"act","jurisdiction":"commonwealth","status":"repealed","isInForce":false,"actNumber":"35 of 1968","makingDate":null,"administeringDepartment":null,"currentVersion":{"id":5400,"registerId":"commonwealth-C1968A00035-current","compilationNumber":null,"startDate":"2026-03-30","status":"Repealed","reasons":null,"registeredAt":null},"sections":[{"sectionNumber":"1","sectionType":"section","heading":"Queensland Grant (Maraboon Dam) Act 1968","content":"Queensland Grant (Maraboon Dam)\n\nNo. 35 of 1968\n\nAn Act to grant Financial Assistance to the State of Queensland in connexion with the construction of a Dam on the Nogoa River near Emerald in that State.\n\n\\[Assented to 13 June 1968\\]\n\nBE it enacted by the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Senate, and the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia, as follows:—\n\nShort title.\n\n1. This Act may be cited as the Queensland Grant (Maraboon Dam) Act 1968.\n\nCommencement.\n\n2. This Act shall come into operation on the day on which it receives the Royal Assent.\n\nInterpretation.\n\n3.—(1.) In this Act, “the State” means the State of Queensland.\n\n(2.) A reference in this Act to the construction of the Maraboon Dam shall be read as a reference to the carrying out of the works and the doing of the other things referred to in the Schedule to this Act.\n\nGrant of financial assistance.\n\n4.—(1.) Subject to this Act, there are payable to the State, by way of financial assistance amounts equal to the amounts expended by the State on or after the twenty-first day of December, One thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven, on the construction of the Maraboon Dam.\n\n(2.) The amounts payable to the State under this Act shall not exceed, in the aggregate, Twenty million dollars.\n\nPower of Minister to vary description of work.\n\n5. Where the State so requests, the Minister may from time to time, by instrument in writing, direct that this Act shall have effect in relation to a work referred to in the Schedule to this Act as if the description in that Schedule of that work were varied in such manner as is specified in the instrument.  \n\nState to carry out irrigation and other works.\n\n6. The State is not entitled to financial assistance under this Act unless the Minister is satisfied that reasonable progress has been made by the State in carrying out irrigation and other works for the purpose of using the water made available by the construction of the dam referred to in the Schedule to this Act.\n\nProvision relating to carrying out of works.\n\n7. The State is not entitled to financial assistance under this Act in relation to expenditure by the State, whether incurred before or after the commencement of this Act, in carrying out a particular work—\n\n(a) where the Minister has requested the State to furnish information in relation to the design or construction of the work—unless the State has duly furnished that information;\n\n(b) unless the Minister is satisfied that the design and construction of the work are in accordance with the purposes for which the work was proposed by the State; and\n\n(c) where the expenditure was incurred under a contract providing for the expenditure of more than Five hundred thousand dollars—unless the contract was entered into with the approval of the Minister.\n\nInformation to be furnished by State in relation to expenditure.\n\n8. The State is not entitled to financial assistance under this Act in relation to particular expenditure by the State unless the State has furnished to the Treasurer—\n\n(a) a statement in respect of that expenditure in a form approved by the Treasurer, accompanied by a certificate of the Auditor-General of the State certifying that the expenditure shown in the statement was incurred on the construction of the Maraboon Dam; and\n\n(b) such further information, if any, as the Treasurer requires in respect of that expenditure.\n\nAdvances.\n\n9. The Treasurer may, at such times as he thinks fit, make advances of such amounts as he thinks fit to the State on account of an amount that may become payable under this Act to the State.\n\nOverpayments.\n\n10. Payment to the State under this Act of any amount (including an advance) is subject to the condition that the State will repay to the Commonwealth, on demand by the Treasurer, the amount by which, at the time of the demand, the total of the amounts (including advances) paid to the State under this Act exceeds the total of the amounts that have become payable to the State under section 4 of this Act.\n\nAppropriation.\n\n11. Amounts payable to the State under this Act are payable out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund, which is appropriated accordingly.  \n\nTHE SCHEDULE Section 3(2.)\n\nMATTERS IN RESPECT OF WHICH FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE IS GRANTED\n\n1. The construction of a dam on the Nogoa River about twelve miles upstream from Emerald, being a dam of a height sufficient to store approximately 1,170,000 acre-feet of water.\n\n2. The construction of auxiliary embankments and of spillway and outlet works.\n\n3. The construction of access roads to the dam and to the spillway and outlet works.\n\n4. The relocation of roads and other services that may be affected by the storage of water in the dam.\n\n5. The carrying out of works incidental to any of the works referred to in the preceding paragraphs of this Schedule.\n\n6. The establishment of construction camps required in connexion with the carrying out of any of the works referred to in the preceding paragraphs of this Schedule and the provision of services necessary for those camps, including the construction of roads and the provision of power, water, sewerage and telecommunication facilities.\n\n7. The acquisition of land that is required for the carrying out of any of the works referred to in the preceding paragraphs of this Schedule or may be affected by any of those works.","sortOrder":0}],"analysis":{"summary":{"complexity_score":3,"scope_assessment":{"changed":false,"description":"The Act is narrow and purpose-built. Its scope is identical to its original intent: a one-off Commonwealth grant to Queensland for the specific construction of the Maraboon Dam on the Nogoa River near Emerald, capped at $20 million. There is no evidence of amendments broadening the Act's purpose, adding new beneficiaries, or extending it to unrelated infrastructure. The Schedule precisely defines the works covered, and the Minister's power to vary work descriptions (section 5) is limited to adjustments within that existing framework at Queensland's request — not an expansion of scope."},"complexity_factors":["Only 2 defined terms ('the State' and 'construction of the Maraboon Dam')","Straightforward grant-reimbursement model with a clear monetary cap ($20 million)","Conditions on payment (sections 6, 7, 8) involve some conditional logic but are plainly drafted and not nested","A single Schedule with 7 clearly described works items","Minimal cross-referencing — sections refer to each other only a handful of times","No penalties, offences, or enforcement regime to navigate","No sunset clauses, review mechanisms, or delegated legislation complexity","One modest flexibility mechanism (Minister's power to vary Schedule descriptions under section 5)"],"plain_english_summary":"## Queensland Grant (Maraboon Dam) Act 1968\n\nThis Act authorises the Commonwealth Government to give **financial assistance (a grant of money) to Queensland** to help build the **Maraboon Dam** on the Nogoa River, located about 12 miles upstream from Emerald in central Queensland.\n\n### What does it do?\n\n- **Commits Commonwealth money**: The Commonwealth agrees to reimburse Queensland dollar-for-dollar for money Queensland spends on building the dam, up to a **maximum total of $20 million**.\n- **Covers a broad range of construction activities**, including:\n  - Building the main dam wall (large enough to store approximately 1.17 million acre-feet of water)\n  - Spillways, outlet works, and auxiliary embankments\n  - Access roads and relocated roads/services affected by the new reservoir\n  - Worker construction camps and associated services (power, water, sewerage, telecommunications)\n  - Acquiring land needed for — or flooded by — the dam\n- **Backdates eligibility**: Queensland can claim reimbursement for spending from as early as **21 December 1967**, even before the Act became law.\n\n### Who does it affect?\n\n- **The Queensland State Government**, which must comply with various conditions to receive the money.\n- **Residents and landowners** in the Emerald region, whose land and infrastructure may be affected by the dam and reservoir.\n- **Commonwealth taxpayers**, whose money funds the grant via the Consolidated Revenue Fund (the Commonwealth's main bank account).\n\n### Conditions Queensland must meet\n\nQueensland doesn't get a blank cheque — the Commonwealth Minister holds meaningful oversight powers:\n\n- Queensland must demonstrate **reasonable progress** on irrigation and water-use infrastructure to actually put the stored water to work\n- Queensland must provide **detailed financial statements** certified by its own Auditor-General (an independent government financial officer)\n- The Commonwealth Minister must be satisfied the work is built **according to its stated purposes**\n- Any contract worth **more than $500,000** requires the **Minister's prior approval**\n- Queensland must answer any information requests about design or construction before claiming payments\n\n### Other key mechanics\n\n- The Commonwealth Treasurer can make **advance payments** before all conditions are formally verified\n- Any **overpayments or advances** that exceed what Queensland legitimately qualifies for must be **repaid on demand**\n- The Minister can **adjust the description of works** in the Schedule (the list of approved construction activities) if Queensland requests it — providing some flexibility for a large infrastructure project\n\n### Why does it matter?\n\nThe Maraboon Dam (now known as **Fairbairn Dam**) became a major piece of water infrastructure for central Queensland, enabling significant irrigation farming in the Emerald district. This Act is a classic example of **Commonwealth–State cooperative federalism** (where the two levels of government work together on a major project), with the Commonwealth funding and the State building and operating."},"issue_detection":{"absurdities":[{"type":"retroactive_impossibility","section":"Section 4(1) and Section 2","severity":"medium","reasoning":"Section 7 compounds this by explicitly acknowledging expenditure 'whether incurred before or after the commencement of this Act', confirming the retroactive intent. While retroactive financial grants are not legally impossible, the compliance conditions in sections 7 and 8 create a practical absurdity: section 7(a) requires the State to have 'duly furnished' information requested by the Minister in relation to design or construction, and section 7(c) requires Ministerial approval for contracts over $500,000 — yet both of these conditions must be satisfied for expenditure incurred before the Act (and therefore before the Minister had any statutory power to request information or grant approvals) existed. The State cannot retrospectively obtain Ministerial approval for contracts already entered into before the Act commenced.","confidence":0.87,"description":"The Act grants financial assistance for expenditure incurred by Queensland on or after 21 December 1967, yet the Act only came into operation on 13 June 1968 — the day it received Royal Assent. This means the Commonwealth is retroactively reimbursing expenditure incurred approximately six months before the Act existed, including expenditure incurred before Parliament had even passed the legislation."},{"type":"retroactive_impossibility","section":"Section 7(c)","severity":"high","reasoning":"The Minister had no statutory power to approve contracts under this Act prior to its commencement on 13 June 1968. A dam construction project of this scale (capped at $20 million) would almost certainly involve contracts exceeding $500,000 entered into during the six-month retroactive window. Those contracts could never satisfy section 7(c) because the approval mechanism did not legally exist when they were executed. The State would thus be permanently disentitled from claiming assistance for a potentially substantial portion of the qualifying expenditure.","confidence":0.91,"description":"Section 7(c) disqualifies the State from financial assistance for expenditure under any contract exceeding $500,000 'unless the contract was entered into with the approval of the Minister', yet section 4(1) explicitly grants assistance for expenditure 'on or after the twenty-first day of December, One thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven' — before the Act or the Minister's approval power existed. Any such large contract entered into between 21 December 1967 and 13 June 1968 would have been impossible to enter into with Ministerial approval under this Act, making compliance with section 7(c) retroactively impossible for that period."},{"type":"circular_definition","section":"Section 3(2) and Schedule Item 5","severity":"low","reasoning":"While 'incidental' is a common and judicially interpreted term, its inclusion within the Schedule that is itself definitional creates a self-referential loop. The construction of the dam is defined to include incidental works; those incidental works are defined by reference to the other works that constitute the dam's construction. In practice this is a low-severity drafting inelegance rather than a fatal flaw, but it does leave the outer boundary of qualifying expenditure genuinely uncertain.","confidence":0.72,"description":"Schedule Item 5 grants assistance for 'works incidental to any of the works referred to in the preceding paragraphs of this Schedule', and section 3(2) defines 'construction of the Maraboon Dam' as carrying out all works in the Schedule. This creates a mild circularity: the Schedule defines the dam's construction to include works incidental to the dam's construction, without any outer boundary on what qualifies as 'incidental'."},{"type":"impossible_compliance","section":"Section 6","severity":"medium","reasoning":"The State has no way of knowing what standard of 'reasonable progress' will satisfy the Minister, no legislative benchmark to work towards, and no appeal mechanism. Construction of the dam itself could be complete while the Minister remains unsatisfied about downstream irrigation works — works that are separately funded, separately scoped, and potentially subject to entirely different constraints. This gives the Commonwealth an effectively unlimited veto over grant payments that is structurally impossible to compel through the Act's own terms.","confidence":0.82,"description":"Section 6 conditions financial assistance on the Minister being satisfied that 'reasonable progress has been made by the State in carrying out irrigation and other works for the purpose of using the water made available by the construction of the dam'. However, the Act provides no definition of 'reasonable progress', no timeline against which progress is measured, no process for the State to demonstrate compliance, and no mechanism for the Minister's satisfaction to be reviewed or challenged. The Minister's satisfaction is entirely subjective and unreviewable on its merits, meaning the Commonwealth could withhold all assistance indefinitely simply by the Minister remaining 'unsatisfied'."},{"type":"other","section":"Section 5 and Schedule","severity":"medium","reasoning":"Since section 3(2) defines 'construction of the Maraboon Dam' by direct reference to the Schedule, and section 5 allows the Schedule's contents to be varied by a simple ministerial instrument, the core subject matter of the Act — a dam on the Nogoa River storing 1,170,000 acre-feet — could theoretically be replaced with an entirely different project description. There is no requirement that the varied work remain related to the Nogoa River, Emerald, or any dam at all. The $20 million cap in section 4(2) is the only remaining structural constraint. This is an unusual and potentially absurd delegation of legislative power.","confidence":0.78,"description":"Section 5 allows the Minister to vary the description of works in the Schedule at the State's request, effectively allowing the entire defined scope of the project — and therefore the entire definition of what constitutes 'construction of the Maraboon Dam' under section 3(2) — to be altered by ministerial instrument without any Parliamentary oversight, limit, or constraint on how far variations may go."}],"contradictions":[{"severity":"high","section_a":"Section 4(1)","section_b":"Section 7(c)","confidence":0.91,"description":"Section 4(1) expressly grants financial assistance for expenditure incurred 'on or after the twenty-first day of December, One thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven', creating an entitlement for pre-commencement expenditure. Section 7(c) simultaneously disqualifies expenditure under any contract exceeding $500,000 unless entered into 'with the approval of the Minister'. No Ministerial approval under this Act could have existed before 13 June 1968, directly contradicting the section 4(1) entitlement for the retroactive period and rendering pre-commencement large contracts permanently ineligible despite section 4(1)'s apparent inclusion of them."},{"severity":"low","section_a":"Section 9","section_b":"Section 10","confidence":0.68,"description":"Section 9 grants the Treasurer an unfettered discretion to make advances 'of such amounts as he thinks fit' at 'such times as he thinks fit', with no upper limit specified in that section. Section 10 then subjects all payments (including advances) to a condition that overpayments must be repaid. While not a direct logical contradiction, section 9's open-ended discretion to advance amounts sits in tension with section 4(2)'s $20 million aggregate cap — section 9 does not itself incorporate the cap, meaning the Treasurer could advance amounts exceeding $20 million, with section 10 then requiring their repayment. The Act relies entirely on section 10's repayment condition rather than section 9 itself to police the cap, creating a structural gap where the advance power appears broader than the grant entitlement."},{"severity":"low","section_a":"Section 7 (chapeau)","section_b":"Section 8","confidence":0.65,"description":"Section 7 conditions entitlement on compliance with its paragraphs (a), (b), and (c) in relation to 'carrying out a particular work', while section 8 separately conditions entitlement on furnishing a Treasurer-approved statement and Auditor-General's certificate in relation to 'particular expenditure'. Both sections independently gate the same financial assistance payment, but they use different units of measurement — section 7 operates work-by-work while section 8 operates expenditure-by-expenditure — creating potential ambiguity about whether a single claim can be partially approved (some expenditure items certified, others not) or must be assessed as a whole per work. The Act provides no mechanism to reconcile these parallel gating conditions."}]}},"importantCases":[],"_links":{"self":"/api/acts/queensland-grant-maraboon-dam-act-1968","history":"/api/acts/queensland-grant-maraboon-dam-act-1968/history","analysis":"/api/acts/queensland-grant-maraboon-dam-act-1968/analysis","conflicts":"/api/acts/queensland-grant-maraboon-dam-act-1968/conflicts","importantCases":"/api/acts/queensland-grant-maraboon-dam-act-1968/important-cases","documents":"/api/acts/queensland-grant-maraboon-dam-act-1968/documents"}}